MY BROTHER'S WEDDING

Year: 1983Country:USARun Time:
120 minutes

Writer-direcor Charles Burnett grew up in Los Angeles and specialized in filmmaking at UCLA, receiving his MFA in 1977. "Killer of Sheep," his first feature, won the Berlin Film Festival's Critics' Prize in 1980 and that same year Burnett received a Guggenheim Fellowship to do pre-production work on MY BROTHER'S WEDDING. These widely acclaimed films establish Charles Burnett as a vital force in a new generation of independent black filmmaking. MY BROTHER'S WEDDING was shot in Los Angeles and, like "Killer of Sheep," centers on black community life in urban Watts. Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas) is 30 and single. He works in the family dry-cleaning store and is unfavorably compared by his parents to their older son, a rising lawyer about to marry a doctor's daughter. Pierce's ghetto buddies are either dead or in prison; his best friend, Soldier, has just been released from prison and after a return to his previous habits, killed in an accident. Fiercely loyal to the ghetto, Pierce resents his snobbish future sister-in-law and her family's bourgeois life, complete with Mexican domestic help. Soldier's funeral and Pierce's brother's wedding are set for the same hour, same day and Pierce is torn between his two obligations. Tur-to-life situations and characters are reflected with humor and insight.

"Burnett dramatizes with great clarity the complexity of true priorities. . .Burnett has created events and situations that naturally draw from the depths of everyone. A very beautiful and moving film." -Los Angeles Times